Collective Commentary about the New Package Travel Directive

PORTUGAL | CARLOS TORRES 1111 After China, Germany is the second-largest outbound tourism market in the world, representing a share of 8.0% of total world tourist demand, according to Euromonitor International, which reflects the importance that the activity of travelling assumes for its citizens. In line with the 2018 ReiseAnalyse study, “in 2017, the average spending per trip and tourist amounted to € 1,045 for holiday trips over five days and € 266 for short holiday trips (2-4 days). The German tourist made, on average, 1.29 trips of five or more days and 2.39 trips of 2 to 4 days. The average daily expenditure per person was € 87.4, and the average stay abroad was 13.5 days” (TravelBI, Turismo de Portugal, Characterisation of the issuing market in Germany, 2019). In Germany, the set of standards that protects package travel consumers is transposed in the most important set of laws of any country, the Civil Code (Bürgerlichen Gesetzbuches, commonly known as BGB). This was the case in the 1990s, with the transposition of Directive 90/314/ EEC, of 13 June 1990, on package travel, package holidays and package tours, as well as on the recent Directive 2015/2302/ EU on package travel and linked travel arrangements. Germany not only reserved the most notable legal diploma for this set of European standards – which constitutes a world reference – but has also a set of renowned specialists in the academic and professional fields, as well as in the courts. The Reiserecht books, the collective comments about the Directive and the numerous decisions made by its courts are indispensable for the study of these matters. Regarding the implementation deadline, Germany presented a draft in the first months of 2016, followed by an intense and wide-ranging debate, in which Chancellor Merkel herself participated. Germany was one of the first Member States to transpose the Directive, respecting the 1 January 2018 deadline (Art. 28/1), certainly bearing in mind the condemnation that, for that reason, the European justice had inflicted on them twenty years earlier. Indeed, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) had condemned Germany in the famous Dillenkofer case, stating that the failure to implement a Directive in a timely or incorrect manner creates civil liability by the Member State vis-à-vis consumers injured by the bankruptcy of tour operators. The crucial argument of the actions for damages proposed against the Federal Republic of Germany was as follows: if Article 7 of the Directive had been transposed into German law within the prescribed period – that is, before 31 December 1992, consumers would have been protected from the operators’